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Alright, I wasn’t going to say anything about the grappling taking place on the end of the last page, because portraying a complex grappling maneuver over 2 panels is just plain hard to do and I’m not about to fault the artist for it not being a perfect play-by-play, but it leads into a nitpick I have with this page. I’d even go as far as saying it seems like too much action was squeezed into too few panels on the prior page. Panel 4 in particular is so abstract and lacking in detail that it actually confuses things more than it helps. It would have been nice if it gave a pretty clear indicator where Kale is and what she was doing E.G. running towards where the shooter jumped down. Yet all I can make out is Callisto, the body, and maybe one other guy lying on top of it? I just can’t be sure. Also there appears to be one other guy that got shot, somehow, and a few people who have hit the deck–I think. Very unclear: they are nearly stick figures, after all. Moving on to the nitpick:

It is unknown what Kale is going for as she runs at the guy, and that isn’t bad in and of itself. It is just that once she gets there it still isn’t clear what she was going for, just that it didn’t work.

I am willing to let that go and stipulate that something happened between the two panels that makes sense. I am a bit more hesitant to accept that any kind of struggle between two skilled hand to hand combatants would look like how things ended up here. Is kale just not good at CQC? If she was going up close to the guy, I am going to assume she would have gone for a take down, which would have involved her coming in low on his center of mass and not letting him move like a maniac and get behind her. She has a hand free that she isn’t even using when he breaks her arm for crying out loud. And, again, it is a bit hard to tell what she was going for in the first place. She might have been going to shake his hand for all I can tell. “Motherfucker” is indeed an odd greeting, however, if that is the case.

Anyhow, on to the rest of this page. Ultimately my objections all boil down to how the things that happen and the choices the characters make don’t seem to make sense in what I can see of the context. Let’s assume they were doing the typical police/secret service response to this sort of thing: Kale and Callisto and anyone else nearby would have dogpiled the guy up close, or shot him down from a safe distance. Callisto (the one established as collected and professional when on the job) has not sprung into action and instead has hung back with the exploded head body to let her significant other have a one on one which she proceeds to botch for no apparent reason. Whatever, shit happens.

Then the guy with the backpack miniguns shouts an ineffectual warning to Kale, who is being hoisted in a one-handed frontal choke by the guy he wants to shoot (while she still has one good arm and two good legs, mind you. Why isn’t she kicking the crap out of his torso? Why isn’t she taking his sloppy one handed grab and turning it into a freaking armbar or something? Is she reeling in pain? Knocked out? What gives? I thought synths were tough cookies who could turn off pain and stuff? Seems pretty inconsistent to have her being a rag-doll like this. At least have him yoking her up by the back of her neck: she would have a much harder time dealing with that, assuming her joints work close enough to a human.) and Phats proceeds to unload on her anyway. Hoo boy. I have questions:

1. Firstly, why does Phats feel the urgent need to shoot this guy only NOW after Kale made it over to him. He pulled out those guns awhile ago.

2. What possessed him to open fire even with an ally engaged with his target? Shooting at someone who is in close proximity with a friendly target is something you want to avoid at all costs, but, if you must, you generally don’t want to try it with a fucking double minigun.

2.5. Why on earth would you take a double-minigun to an indoor security detail? You know, a place with potential for a LOT of collateral damage?

3. Could he not see and react to Kale being held in the line of fire? Did he not care?

4. Luckily, it didn’t freaking matter because the ammunition he was using apparently didn’t have enough stopping power to do anything significant to a synth in any case seeing as how Kale’s torso and limbs are riddled with bullets here and she doesn’t seem particularly stopped by this in later pages. Was he just not using ammunition good enough to take down synths?

5. If so, why would he open fire when the only people he could really hurt were innocent bystanders? Did he not hear the other guy calling out their target was a synth? Did he forget he was loaded out for soft targets?

5.5. Speaking of that other guy, Was the cyborg with the sniper rifle equipped with the correct bullets? The shots the assassin takes to the legs in a few pages seem much more effective.

6. This is for the next page, but that’s just a single image so might as well ask here: why is his weapon system still firing all over the place after he gets knifed? No idea how the trigger works for that, but I would assume it didn’t just get stuck. I realize there are a few potential explanations for this, but most of them don’t make sense unless we get context clues that would imply them. As things stand, it looks like he brought a ridiculously dangerous piece of hardware, with no failsafes, to a crowded party.

Okay, need a breather after that one. Let me simply add in the disclaimer that I am in no way hating on the comic. If I did, I wouldn’t care enough to comment. I am just trying to help and strike up a discussion.